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The proposal restricts Sam Bankman-Fried communication to a flip phone or other non-smartphone device with no internet access. 

The United States Department of Justice has proposed new bail conditions for former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), a court filing made late March 3 shows. 

According to the proposal submitted to District Judge Lewis Kaplan of the Southern District of New York, Bankman-Fried should be prohibited from using smartphones, tablets, computers and any type of video game platforms or devices that allow chat and voice communication. The proposal restricts his communication to "a flip phone or other non-smartphone with either no internet capabilities or internet capabilities disabled."

The document by attorney Damian Williams "on behalf of parties" also requests that the temporary bail conditions recently imposed should be made permanent. The plan is believed to have been negotiated with his defense team, which requested to submit a proposal by March 3.

The temporary terms include no contact or communication with current or former employees of FTX or Alameda Research, except in the presence of counsel, along with a prohibition of using any encrypted or ephemeral call or messaging application, as well as a VPN. 

Bankman-Fried's access to websites would also be restricted to a whitelist of pre-approved pages, which includes YouTube, Wikipedia, Etherscan, NFL, DoorDash, Netflix, and government websites, among others. Under the proposed terms, the former FTX CEO will be allowed to visit news websites as well, including Cointelegraph.

Further, Bankman-Fried's laptop would be monitored by a security software that will log his online activity. In addition, the proposal notes that:

"​​Fifth, the defendant will not object to the installation of court-authorized pen registers on his phone number, Gmail account, and internet service. Those pen register orders will be sought by the Government and maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation." 

Bankman-Fried's $250 million bail has been under scrutiny since Feb. 9, after he was found to have contacted potential witnesses on his case. He was also temporarily banned from using a VPN after prosecutors accused him of using it on two occasions, on Jan. 29 and Feb. 12.

The court unsealed a superseding indictment against Bankman-Fried on Feb. 22 containing 12 criminal counts, including eight conspiracy charges related to fraud as well as four charges of wire fraud and securities fraud. Nhb7a
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Flare, the layer-1 Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) blockchain, went live on Jan. 10 after it launched two core protocols for decentralized interoperability applications. The blockchain network allows developers to create applications that are interoperable between various blockchain ecosystems and internet platforms.

Less than one month later, on March 2, Flare welcomed the nonfungible token (NFT) platform Sparkles on its layer 1 oracle network.

According to the announcement a primary goal of the Sparkles NFT platform is to hone in on the interoperability of native Flare protocols to increase use cases for NFT utility.

The NFT platform has plans to target other major issues in the space such as intellectual property (IP) rights via attaching on-chain IP licensing to future collections. Sparkles also has plans of decentralizing its core technology and infrastructure after it transitions into a DAO.

Since its launch on Songbird, the canary network for Flare, in Jan. 2022, Sparkles has handled 90% of NFT sales, which accounts for $3.5 million in sales. It currently hosts over 3,200 collections.

Additionally, in 2021 Sparkles joined the Crypto Climate Accord with a pledge to become net-zero by 2023. The platform reports to have achieved an environmentally positive status via carbon credits, which it retired on-chain via the Toucan bridge. 

Interoperability is a big theme for the decentralized space going forward in 2023. It is one of the major focuses of many companies and communities in the space to help with scalability and onboarding more users. New tools like trustless bridges have been implemented in order to create safer options for the implementation of interoperable solutions. 

The Web3 Domain alliance recently expanded with an addition of 51 new members, after which it named interoperability as one of its main focuses for the year.

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Cointelegraph’s Crypto Trading Secrets podcast has published Episode 6, covering an array of content that should pique the interest of cryptocurrency traders. This episode’s guest is Brian Krogsgard, also known as Ledgerstatus on Twitter. Krogsgard is a trader and one of the co-founders of Flip.xyz, a nonfungible token (NFT) platform. He is also a podcaster in the crypto space. 

Among the questions fielded during the Feb. 16 recording, host Benjamin Pirus asked Krogsgard to give his opinion on what he thinks has most impacted the price of Bitcoin (BTC) over the past year. “Liquidity,” he responded. 

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“People just do not have spare liquidity for a multitude of reasons. They have counterparties that went bankrupt, and that might have forced them to lose money. They got coins stuck on places that went bankrupt. Lost access to them, lost in trading, lost because of taxes, whatever.”

“Those are all challenges for liquidity, and you need liquidity for the healthiest of markets, and so that’s been a challenge,” he added. Amid the runaway train that was the 2022 crypto bear market, the space saw significant turmoil. Several cryptocurrency companies failed, including the likes of crypto exchange giant FTX. 

“I would actually say the problems go way before that with Bitcoin because we saw with FTX there was massive rehypothecation of Bitcoin,” Krogsgard continued. “Rehypothecation” is when entities use customers’ collateral for other activities, according to Investopedia. The collapse of FTX in November 2022 sparked numerous headlines, such as allegations of customer asset misuse by FTX and sister entity Alameda Research.

“So, the Bitcoin people thought they had on FTX was not there, and FTX was selling it to do other things. And that rehypothecation was actually a burden to Bitcoin’s price even in a bull market. And now that we have liquidity issues, it’s just been a consistent kind of drag on price and presented challenges for a year and then some.”

Krogsgard provided his thoughts and opinions on several other points during the episode and also chatted about his background.

Check out this and other episodes from Cointelegraph’s Crypto Trading Secrets podcast on Cointelegraph’s podcast page, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or TuneIn.